IBM's New Chip: Big Blue Goes Green

The computer company's POWER6 microprocessor doubles the speed of the previous chip generation while using the same amount of power

by Jennifer L. Schenker

IBM (IBM) has unveiled its new POWER6 microprocessor, which it claims is the world's fastest chip, boasting twice the clock speed of the previous generation while consuming roughly the same amount of power. Making the announcement on May 21, Big Blue also revealed a new computer server that takes advantage of the chip's technical and energy conservation prowess.

The new product is the first to fit in with IBM's announcement last week that it will redirect $1 billion per year across its businesses to increase energy efficiency in information technology under a program called "Project Big Green." The plan includes new products and services to reduce corporate data center energy consumption.

Analyst firm IDC (IDC) estimates that roughly 50 cents is spent on energy for every dollar of computer hardware. This is expected to increase by 54% to 71 cents over the next four years.

Cutting Usage in Half

Like IBM, rivals Hewlett Packard (HPQ) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) also have announced energy-saving initiatives, says IDC analyst Chris Ingles. This isn't surprising since an IDC survey of chief information officers and facilities managers found providing power and floor space are becoming increasingly important customer concerns. The IBM products announced Monday aim to address both issues.

Analysts said the POWER6 chip, which operates at 4.7 gigahertz, will allow businesses to consolidate servers and handle substantially larger workloads, doubling the speed of the previous generation POWER5 chip while using the same amount of electricity for running and cooling. This means customers can use the new processor either to increase their performance by 100% or cut their power consumption in half. POWER6 also claims to be nearly three times faster than the latest HP Itanium processor that runs HP's server line.

The new IBM chip boasts a lot of bandwidth, some 300 gigabytes per second, which the company said would be fast enough to process the download of the entire 5 million song iTunes music catalog in 60 seconds. IBM has also quadrupled the amount of on-chip memory, or cache, to eight megabytes. The chip is designed for higher-end servers running the Unix operating system and is accompanied by the launch of a new server in the company's System p series.

Unix Still Critical

The new server claims to be the first to hold the No. 1 spot in the four most widely used performance benchmarks for Unix-based servers and has notched 25 benchmark records across a broad portfolio of business and technical applications, says Ross Mauri, the general manager for System p in IBM's systems and technology group.

Although Windows and Linux have grown in popularity, Unix is still critical to most large organizations' data center strategies. And, over the past few years IBM's Unix offering, System p, has taken share away from its closest competitors, HP's Integrity and Sun's SPARC. IBM has gained 10.4 points of UNIX revenue share in the past five years, vs. HP's loss of 5.3 points and Sun's loss of 1.4 points, according to IDC.

Looking to London

With POWER6, IBM is looking to generate a clear technological lead over the competition, says IDC's Ingles. "System p is one of the most profitable parts of IBM's server line," he says. "Although the market for Unix has been flat over the past four years, success in this area remains critical to both IBM's server business and the services which IBM and its partners sell with the server upgrade."

Still, IBM is not doing as well selling Unix servers in Europe as in the U.S., hence its decision to try and make as big a splash as possible with its announcement by holding the press conference in London, says Gordan Haff, principal IT advisor at Illuminata, an IT advisory firm in Nashua, N.H. You never know, Europeans are pretty big on green these days.

Jennifer L. Schenker is a BusinessWeek correspondent in Paris.